Mobile

Ada-Java Mix In AdaCore GNAT Pro 7.2 for Android

By Adrian Bridgwater, April 03, 2014

Development environment extends support for ARM platforms

AdaCore has released its latest GNAT Pro 7.2 cross-development environment for ARM Cortex processors running Android. This product has a complete Ada tool suite for developing and maintaining Android applications using a mixture of Ada and Java.

The ARM Cortex-A8 processor, based on the ARMv7 architecture, has the ability to scale in speed from 600MHz to greater than 1GHz — the Cortex-A8 processor can meet the requirements for power-optimized mobile devices needing operation in less than 300mW.

The Ada-Java mix here means that developers can use the software engineering benefits of the Ada language, while also taking advantage of the Java libraries and services provided by the Android platform.

Applications can also be written solely in Ada, or in a combination of Ada and other "native" languages — Android 2.3 and later versions are supported, on Cortex A8 and above.

AdaCore says that a "recent trend" is the use of COTS (commercial off the shelf) portable devices in mission-critical contexts, such as military command and control and industrial process management.

In these systems, the original OS and consumer-oriented applications are replaced by customized versions that include domain-specific software using proprietary and/or confidential algorithms.

"GNAT Pro for Android offers developers an attractive solution by generating highly efficient, native ARM code for the algorithms, while giving access to the common Android graphics library for implementing the user interface. With Ada's strong typing and other compile-time checks, GNAT Pro and supplemental static analysis tools, such as CodePeer, can detect many errors and vulnerabilities early in the development stage, an especially important advantage in embedded systems where recalls or updates may be expensive or impractical," said Cyrille Comar, AdaCore managing director.

Incorporating more than 120 new features, this latest GNAT Pro tool suite implements the Ada 2012 language standard by default.

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